List of Persian/Iranian Events for 2012-03-22

Persian New Year Celebration

Bowery Arts + Science, City Lore and the PAF ring in the Persian New Year in DUMBO, Brooklyn with contemporary literary and musical performances that will delight all ages and backgrounds. Come together and celebrate the wealth and beauty of Persian art and culture this Norooz!

Featuring:

• Multi-media performances by poets on the subjects of life, death, homeland and love. Poets include Roger Sedarat, Sara Goudarzi, Amir Parsa and Kaveh Bassiri. Poems will be projected in Persian morphing into English translations from the roof of the POEMobile, a hand-painted truck and traveling cinexma of words, onto DUMBO's buildings and streets surrounding VII Gallery!

• Film viewing of Niloufar Talebi’s "Persian Rite of Spring: the story of Nowruz" celebrating the Persian New Year. See clips here: http://niloufartalebi.com/Norouz.html

• Musical performance by Middle Eastern-meets-Brooklyn band, Vatan.

• Performance Art by Aphrodite Desiree Navab: Through her
performances, her photographs and writings, Aphrodite explores the symbolism, inevitability and beauty of the rite of Spring.

Bowery Arts + Science, Ltd. is grateful
to the Rockefeller Foundation for its
New York City Cultural Innovation Fund award.

Founded in 2005, the Persian Arts Festival (PAF) is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to showcasing the magnificence and diversity of Persian art and culture through its voices, artists and visionaries. PAF brings local and global communities together to support these artists and explore one of the world’s most ancient and rich civilizations. The festival gives audiences of all ages and traditions the chance to discover new Persian voices and celebrate established ones. Areas represented at previous events have included fine art, music, film, comedy, family activities and literary.

The Persian Arts Festival is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). NYFA is a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt organization founded in 1971 to work with the arts community throughout New York State to develop and facilitate programs in all disciplines.

About the POEMobile:

This performance is one in a series of poetry events composing A White Wing Brushing the Building, a Bowery Arts + Science and City Lore project highlighting the poetry of New York City’s ethnic communities and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Grant. The project will focus on the poetry of 8 cultural communities in New York in 2011 and 8 in 2012, with the majority of the events happening during the summer. The titular “white wing” is taken from a poem by Martín Espada and refers to the projections of the poems that are integral part of the project as well as the live poetry readings which will happen in each of the communities.

To date, White Wing has hosted projections and poetry performances in the languages of the Lower East Side (Yiddish, Ukrainian, Spanish, and Cantonese) at the New Museum’s Festival of New Ideas and new work by Native American poets at the American Indian Community House and by Greek at Federation of Hellenic Societies in Astoria. Additional 2011collaborating communities included Mexican, Haitian, and Nuyorican; the POEMobile also appeared at the 2011 Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival. The events are stand alone programs but unified by the common elements of the poetry projections, which will reach the city’s neighborhoods—its storefronts, its basketball courts, its warehouse walls—from the POEMobile.